


long intervals of horrible sanity

by antivenom



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), me trying to deal with my FEELINGS about this STUPID movie, steve/tony is really only if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-05-17 23:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14841038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antivenom/pseuds/antivenom
Summary: Tony Stark is thinking about 2012. “We won,” Steve had said, sooty, covered in death. They hadn’t. They wouldn’t. Tony doesn’t know what winning looks like.This is what losing looks like. Winning is a process. You have to do it into eternity.Losing is binary. It only has to happen once.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> my whole life is a spoiler for this movie

_I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity._

_Edgar Allen Poe_

 

On a destroyed planet light-years from home, wounds seeping blood into the craggy rock beneath him, Tony Stark is thinking about the Accords.

Not really the Accords themselves, per se, but the fight in Germany.

He remembers: the private jet ride over there. Peter pressed every button he could find, recorded half of it on his phone, kept prodding Tony to answer his frankly inane and overly excited questions. He was uncontained energy. Potential. Tony though that with him, with this kid, they couldn’t lose.

He remembers: they didn’t lose, not really. Things fell apart in such a fragile and delicate web that nobody really lost. It’s just...nobody won either.

He remembers. That was two years ago.

Now Tony Stark is on a destroyed planet light-years from home. He’s been stabbed. There’s no FRIDAY, no suit, no ride home. He wonders if he’ll be forgotten here. Across the plateau, the bionic blue woman--Nebula?--has sat down. Her face is fixed neutrally, and Tony doesn’t know what to do.

He should probably introduce himself. Hey, I’m Tony Stark. Did your whole world just fall apart? Huh. No way.

Me too.

His chest feels odd in a way it never has before.

He’s thinking about Siberia. Being left to bleed in a cold and desolate wasteland, when the universe shifted. Two years ago.

He looks down at himself, his torn skin, and doesn’t feel much of the pain. His hands are shaking, which is interesting. He thinks maybe he should be having a panic attack or something, but his breath comes evenly. His throat isn’t even warm or closing. His eyes are watering, but they’re clear.

He’s thinking about all those hours spent in his lab. New tech, new suits. Back-up plans for the things he had left: gold titanium alloy to replace the fragile suits of his teammates, Rhodey’s new legs. His own new heart, after Steve had put his shield through the old one.

This new tech had _dripped_ off of him; there’s nothing left of this suit now. It’s in pieces around him. Shakily, he scoops up a crushed gauntlet and shifts his thumbnail under one of the joints. It hisses, slightly, remnants of the heat that crushed it, and then cracks apart.

Tony suddenly realizes his hands are dusty.

He remembers: Peter at fifteen. Peter I-Got-Homework Parker, the same kid that followed him to this end of the universe.

“Do you know how to get back?” Tony asks suddenly, his voice coming out a little high. It sounds like he’s flippant, joking, but he doesn’t mean it that way. He wants to go home. He wants to _be_ home, with the same sincerity that a child wants their mother. The desperation heats his marrow.

This is how the world ends, and Tony Stark is going to be forgotten.

Nebula shifts to look at him. She’s fearsome, and Tony is afraid of her for an inexplicable reason. But she doesn’t speak. Her eyes shift away. The Space-People (for lack of knowing their team name) had to have arrived on some sort of ship, but Tony doesn’t know how to ask this woman to please, please take him home. Take him to his team, his family, to whatever he has left.

They are standing in a graveyard.

Tony Stark is thinking about Germany. He’d said to Peter, “You’re going to need to go for his legs. Anything else and he’s too strong for you. Too experienced.”

Peter had scoffed, “Hey no offense, Mr. Stark, but I think I’m pretty good at this stuff now.”

“You can fight petty criminals, Spider-Man. You’ve never fought Captain America.”

“Oh.” Peter had paused, the light dimming a little in his eyes. Then he’d perked up again, always the energy in the room. The kid had guts. “I can’t wait to meet him!”

Tony had just sighed and sat back in his seat. Peter Parker was eager, uncoordinated, awkward. He was good. His heart was good.

Tony’s quick-fix for his wound is starting to hurt. It’s seeping around the edges. With an idle finger, he traces the outline of his own weapon imprinted in his skin. Thanos had known him. Had called him by name. A genocidal maniac meets an ex-warmonger. Sounds like a start to a bad joke. 

I hope they remember you.

Tony is suddenly aware that he should be a little more worried. This distanced, relaxed demeanor is probably a bad thing, right? He should be in pieces right now. He should be frantic. Demanding tech to get home, to get back to his planet. He should be worried about dying, because if he doesn’t get home he’s going to die. It’s looking really bad for him at the moment.

But Tony Stark is thinking about Germany, Siberia, New York City.

He thinks about rubble, a blinding sun. A heat-dream brought about by magic. Why didn’t you do more? 

He’s watching strangers disappear before his eyes, still. It’s been years, but that’s still happening, isn’t it? Buildings are falling and the people he loves are falling with them. Loss is an indirect cycle. Right now though--right now it circles above him like a black hole.

Tony’s hands feel too hot.

There is a sudden loud, booming noise, and then brilliant light. An explosion, maybe? The final end? Tony isn’t all that worried. He’s thinking about Obie selling him out to terrorists in the Afghan mountains. Maybe Thanos is just now winning. Maybe he’s losing. Tony doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn't care. Thanos is on earth. Tony is not

But the light dies, and inside it is a figure.

Thor.

“Holy lord _,”_ Tony says, his voice coming out fresh like he hasn’t used it in days. He rockets to his feet, vomit climbing his way up his esophagus, something incredulous in his throat.

It’s relief. He wasn’t forgotten here, they came, they came, they're _alive,_ at least enough to remember him. He doesn’t think to worry about what happened on Earth. This moment is just Thor. Skin and bones and oxygen.

Which...okay, that’s the first healthy response he’s had since Peter, a child, seventeen years old and filled to the brim with potential had looked at him with a question in his eyes and said. “I don’t feel good.”

Tony doesn’t feel good, either.

He all but stumbles to Thor, while Nebula stands up in his peripheral vision. Tony gets both hands around Thor’s forearms and breathes, “Thor.” It’s been years. His hair is short. His skin is hot to the touch.

He’s alive. He’s a face that Tony recognizes.

“Hello, Tony.” Thor says, and there are so many questions. So many to ask, but Tony can’t do it. He just holds on to the sweaty meat of Thor’s arms and trembles on two exhausted feet. “We have to go home. The people on Earth sent me to find you.” Thor says, his eyes softening, his face twisting and _oh_.

Thor has two different colored eyes.

Tony Stark is thinking about 2012. “We won,” Steve had said, sooty, covered in death. They hadn’t. They wouldn’t. Tony doesn’t know what winning looks like.

This is what losing looks like. Winning is a process. You have to do it into eternity.

Losing is binary. It only has to happen once.

* * *

 

They end up in a futuristic looking room in a place that Tony doesn’t recognize. Everything is wrong and foreign. The words he catches aren’t in English. He spares a thought at first to wonder if it wasn’t himself that died on Titan rather than Peter and Quill and Mantis and Drax and Stephen and--

Thor has a different weapon, Tony notes suddenly. Does this one only let those who are worthy lift it? Maybe all the Avengers can pass it around and see if any of them have become worthy since this shitshow started.

He doesn’t want to ask, but he has to know. Are they even Avengers anymore?

Tony wipes at his eyes. “Who.” It’s not a question.

Thor looks older than his effervescent youth, exhaustion and grief a second skin around him. “Tony, you’re injured.” He says. It makes sense. Why go into the details now. Everyone will still be dead in the few hours it’ll take for him to get stitched up.

It’s not comical, but Tony sorta wants to laugh.

He tries to dredge a flippant response but instead says, “ _W_ _ho_.” Harder, more urgently. The tears are gathering. And yeah, okay good, here’s the panic. Knock knock it’s me, your chronic and debilitating anxiety.

He remembers: crashing a Hydra compound in search of an elusive scepter, even banter covering the groans and grunts of injured men. Natasha on point, Clint up high, Thor and Steve mostly fucking around to see who could knock out the most guys in one punch, Bruce tapping his hands together anxiously on the quinjet when they came back bloodier but not worse for wear. He remembers the thrill of a sweaty mission, the idea that their goal was somewhere, that it was attainable. 

“Thor, don’t fucking test me right now, _who else_.” he demands, then. Thor closes his two different colored eyes and Tony lurches back from him, suddenly terrified. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Thor frown, now that he thinks about it. And now Tony’s clutching onto him like he’s all that’s left of the universe, and Thor’s face is drawn like Tony is right in that assumption.

Nebula, from where she’s been looking out the window onto some sort of sprawling and exotic grasslands, says, “A half of everyone you’ve ever known and loved. Random. That was what he wanted.” She looks at Thor, “He got all the stones, didn’t he. He won.” Nebula turns back to Tony coldly. “Just make your best guess. You’ve got a fifty percent chance.”

“Vision. His...” Tony cuts abruptly. What had Strange had said...this is the only way? What kind of bullshit was that? _This was the only way_ , like a cost-benefit analysis of half the entire universe being fucking obliterated was somehow deemed a win.

Thor lowers his eyes. “We can debrief after you heal, Tony. It’s not good news.”

Tony takes a shallow breath in. “I just watched _several_ different people turn to--” The door opens and he cuts off. Wetly.

The first person he sees is Natasha, and his legs give. He lands heavy on Thor, who catches him, and Natasha crosses the room with a small exhale. She hugs him fiercely. It’s been two years since she betrayed him and let Steve and Bucky go, but it was years before that when she saved his life. She smells like intestines. It’s good. Her heart beats and she takes up space and has a gravitational pull. She’s  _here_.

“Oh thank god,” And that’s Rhodey, Jesus, Tony’s heart is about to give out again and he doesn’t even have shrapnel in it. The relief is dizzying, especially considering he hadn’t realized he was this worried.

Of course, he knows this is sick relief. It’s going to come down, but they’re _here_. They remembered to come get him from the alien planet. They saved him and they’re alive.

It’s cosmically comical: the one thing Tony has ever been afraid of (being alone) and it comes true over and over and over and over again. He gets people just to lose them.

He’s hot into his elbows with their presence. The sob in his chest builds, but it’s not close to breaking. Not yet. A weird combination of denial and shock are insofar working in Tony’s favor.

Rhodey is carrying a woman, dressed in heavy, decorated gear. She’s bald and bleeding. He places her gently onto another cot and straightens. Rhodey rips a gauntlet off the suit and gets a hand on the back of Tony’s neck, shifts him so both Thor and Rhodey are supporting him. Thor is warm at his side, Rhodey’s metal armor decidedly less so, but it’s enough. It’s something.

“Come on, man, why don’t you sit down. Natasha, get that headwound looked at.” Rhodey eases Tony backward to the cot behind him.

She blinks. Throatily, she says, “Bruce is still figuring out how to get out of the suit.”

“Bruce?” He says, words closing up, and then, “Suit?”

“Long story.” Rhodey says. “But they’re all long stories, I guess.”

Thor, who is still touching Tony, says again, “We need to debrief after we all get cleaned up. There’s no use talking about it right now. We have some time to figure out what to do.”

“Shuri should help with Tony.” Natasha gestures to Tony’s stab wound, which is beginning to bulge a little. “I’ll get sanitized and bandaged. Anyone else hurt?”

There’s a brief silence. It was a stupid question. “Right.” She says. Tony takes stock of the room. Thor, Rhodey, Nat. Bruce, somewhere. The injured bald woman.

Okay.

Natasha is right. The only way to go about this now is procedurally. What else can they do?

The door opens again. A young woman with sharp cheekbones, her hair mussed, lip bleeding, eye swollen. Her jaw is set. “This one needed help with the suit. Whoever designed that thing made it clunky as a rock.” She smiles, tiredly, just a crinkle. It looks like the tiny shift of muscles is the hardest thing sh'es ever done. Tony realizes belatedly that Bruce is hovering by her side.

She steps more into the room. “Does anyone know what happened?” Her voice is tight. “My guards. Uh. They--” She stops. "My brother?”

Uh oh. Tony watches Natasha stiffen next to her. He gets it then. He remembers the girl from C-SPAN, when they made the announcement to the UN.

Right. So this must be Wakanda.

“Where is T’Challa?” The young woman, who must be Shuri, asks. She’s raised her forearms like she wants to fight someone. “You tell me what happened to him!”

“Shuri,” Natasha says in a slow, low voice.

Tony has to close his eyes. He doesn’t want to watch loss rip through her. Losing the things you love the most should be the most private moment of your life. It’s not meant to be a spectacle.

Besides, Tony thinks behind his eyelids, he knows what that feeling is like. He doesn’t need to watch another universe implode.

This is not a moment she will ever get back.

* * *

 

The tech here is...it’s...Tony would be salivating if he weren’t so fucking numb. He sits on the couch while some sort of magic bean hovers over his abdomen and starts its work. The other people--Avengers?--file in to sit in a circle. A debrief, like SHIELD is still alive, like it’s six years ago.

Tony remembers: sitting forward on the couch as footage of headquarters falling filled the news. Hydra, the news was saying, and this was the worst that the world could bring to them. Captain America on life support and SHIELD in the water.

Nebula, Natasha, Okoye (the injured woman from before, he learns), Bruce, Thor, Rhodey. That’s it. That’s who stands. The list of the dead is much longer.

They’re silent for too long before Tony forces, “What do we do?” out into the air. The question flops, dead on arrival.

“The world must be in chaos.” Bruce murmurs. “Governments, disappearing. People gone.”

“There are only six Avengers left.” Natasha says. “We can’t--” She cuts off, suddenly, and looks at her hands. “Clint isn’t answering the phone.”

Rhodey lets out a breath. “Dammit.” He says.

Okoye says, gently, “We must trust that the governments of the world have fail-safes.”

“And does Wakanda?” returns Bruce.

Okoye closes her eyes, fresh hurt blossoming across her face. “We mourn our king.” She says, and she doesn’t say anything for a long time. “We have a close ally with M’Baku. If he is fit to both challenge the Black Panther and stand by him into battle, then he is fit to sit on the throne of Wakanda.” Her words come out chunky. “Myself and Shuri will see to his success. Other countries will have similar strategies.”

“You hope,” Nebula puts in from her position at the window. “What is half a government going to do in the face of total chaos?” Her shoulders are stiff. It makes Tony ache inside. “What about places that were already in unrest?” Her blue face contorts into disgust, her arms wrapping heavier around herself. She’s the most out of place here, and Tony wants to invite her to sit next to him on the couch. He doesn’t like new people by nature, but thinking about her face when she’d found out Gamora (whoever she was) was dead makes Tony sicker.

“Well, what about Fury?” Tony asks, looking at Natasha. “That big giant dude from…” he clears his throat, “From the airport fight.” He feels Bruce’s eyes at his side and ignores them. “Keep calling Clint. We need,” Tony’s voice breaks. Shit. He was hoping to keep a lid on this. “We need to be united. We can’t--this, uh, there can’t be--”

“Sides.” Rhodey says for him. “There can’t be sides anymore.” Rhodey looks at Tony and says, softly. “I can’t get ahold of Pepper, either.”

Tony lets out a sudden, surprised laugh that was probably more of a sob, “Fuck, Rhodey, some tact, maybe?”

“I’m sorry, I just--”

“There is no way to confront this but head on.” Nebula says. “Bluntly.”

And Tony thinks, oh, yeah. Because this is reality, now. This is real. It doesn’t feel real. He remembers: eating shawarma, thinking _fuck yeah_. Thinking, _we did it_.

Thinking _we’re invincible_.

* * *

 

They’re arguing. They do that, right. The Avengers have never been a team, so why the fuck should any of that change?

They haven’t learned anything. Ultron and Zemo and Loki, they’re still just people tossed together. There’s nothing cohesive about ragged edges forced into one.

Tony remembers: Strange, asking if Peter was Tony’s ward. Both of them sputtered out denials, but the question lingers like a ghost at the back of Tony’s head. He wonders if Pepper’s ring disappeared with Pepper and he feels like he’s been stabbed all over again.

“--don’t really know what you expect us to do about this.” Thor is saying, quietly. Tony wants to ask where he’s been. Wants to get to know his tragedies, if only so his own don’t feel as raw. “It’s over.” He’s saying, and then, under his breath, “Fifteen hundred years. It’s over.”

“I’m sorry Thor, I know you’ve been gone for a while, but what kind of bullshit is that?” Rhodey is saying. “We still have an obligation to help.”

“The whole world?” Natasha counters, “What the hell are we supposed to do about this? How do we even--” She stops. Natasha Romanoff clears her face, takes a breath in. When she starts again she’s measured. “We weren’t a team twenty-four hours ago.” And that...that stings.

For the first time today, Tony feels his eyes heat. It feels a little like being waterboarded. He just wants air, okay, he’s desperate for it. But there is none. This time the terror isn’t going to let him up.

“Is your plan just to do nothing, then?” Nebula puts in. "I swore that I would not let my father win. That I would kill him."

"That turned out poorly." Tony mutters, to himself.

“I don’t know what we _can_ do.” Bruce says. “We’re not enough.”

“The hell we aren’t.” Rhodey says, at the same time Okoye replies, “The world must go on. Our tragedies are everyone’s tragedies.”

“Did you miss the part where everyone died?” Thor asks as Nebula clucks her tongue with distaste. “Terra is more disorganized that I thought.”

“Don’t you have a home? Didn’t _you_ lose something?” Bruce asks nastily to her, and her face freezes.

She tilts her head. Opens her mouth.

Tony remembers: a cold drink in his shaking hands, a different goatee, shrapnel in his chest. If we can’t protect the Earth…

“I think we should go after Thanos.” Tony says in the sudden silence.

If we can’t protect the Earth, then you’d be damn well sure we’ll avenge it.

* * *

 

Three minutes later, Tony Stark, who graduated from MIT, catches the math error. “Natasha.” He says, suddenly. She looks at him, weary, her eyes red-rimmed. “You said six.”

“What?”

Tony is burning. “You said six. Six Avengers.” There are five. Himself, Natasha, Rhodey, Thor, Bruce. The math doesn’t add up.

The whole room freezes.

It’s Bruce who swallows and says, “Yeah, uh,” He says into the silence, “Steve is still out in the field.”

Tony closes his eyes. He remembers: flipping open that phone so many times in a row he’d thought he’d break it. He remembers one night halfway through the bottle pressing the dial, getting a tone, a ring, and then a voicemail. He remembers: Steve punching him in the face, Steve crying alone in the stairwell, Steve cocking a fucking eyebrow and telling him to put on the suit. Let’s go a few rounds.

Something cracks inside Tony, and there are tears in his eyes.

“Tony,” Natasha warns, because Tony is suddenly on his feet.

He ignores her, something brewing ugly inside him, little pieces of Peter Parker still underneath his fingernails.

He remembers: saying, go home kid, and then trying to prepare himself for the possibility that he himself never would. That’s not the way it worked. Peter never made it home. Peter is in infinitesimal little pieces alone on a planet light-years away and all that’s left of him is what’s inside Tony’s heart and underneath his fingernails.

“I wouldn’t--” Rhodey says, and Tony looks at him sharply.

Tony remembers: that moment in between SHIELD and Ultron when life had settled, when they all lived together in a blissful tower like the world couldn’t touch them. Like there wasn’t a dormant poison waiting in each of their veins.

He remembers.

It’s been two fucking years, and Tony is in pieces, but he remembers.

Tony Stark, ghosts running through his veins, stalks from the room to find Steve.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Yeah, you didn’t!” The raccoon from space says. “You didn’t! None of you did!” He’s close enough now that when he turns, he directs the last line at Steve, still slumped over Vision’s corpse.  
> There is unfathomable loss in his anger. “Do you have any idea what we’ve done?”  
> Steve finds his voice, then, clears it. “We lost.” He says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow it's been a hot second

“Oh God,” Steve says, the grass hot beneath his legs, the sun hotter, the sky still so very blue.

For a moment, everything is beautiful. The trees, a whisper of a breeze. Somewhere, the quiet babble of water.

This is the part where Steve breaks from the wall, hurdles from the building and out into Times Square. You were asleep, Cap. This is unreal. This is just a continuation of that same terrible dream that carried him into 2012.

“Sam?” Rhodey is still calling, “Sam!”

Vision lies purple beneath him.

“What the _hell_ just happened?” The voice is tight and ragged and everything Steve feels inside. Within it is a foreign, unrecognizable emotion that’s more anger than sadness, more shock than anger. Something that begs to be screamed, to be torn from a chest, to be beaten bloody into the sky.

Steve watches with a frozen panic as the raccoon-man, skinny and angry, skitters toward Thor.

“Hey! _Hey_!” he shouts, strained like his voice couldn’t be louder, like he wants to uproot his lungs with the force of his anger. “You fuckin’ pirate god!” He unsheathes a dagger from its position on his hairy waist. “You said Stormbreaker was worth something! You said we could do it!” Thor dodges backward.

“I--” He starts, and evidently doesn’t have words, like Steve doesn’t. Steve can’t even move.

This is the part where he inclines his head at the skyscrapers and drowns beneath the neon.

“Sam!” That’s Rhodey, terror a silk thread between three letters, denial in every clunky step that he trods through the undergrowth.

The raccoon cuts the air with his knife. “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you, you stupid, fuckin’” His language dissolves into grunts as he swings, Thor jumping backward, stuttering.

“I am not more than my weapon." Thor says, and the animal stutters to a halt. Thor sets his jaw. "I didn't--"

“Yeah, you didn’t!” The raccoon from space says. “You didn’t! None of you did!” He’s close enough now that when he turns, he directs the last line at Steve, still slumped over Vision’s corpse.

There is unfathomable loss in his anger. “Do you have any idea what we’ve done?”

Steve finds his voice, then, clears it. “We lost.” He says.

This is the part where Steve loses his whole life again.

Apparently, though, his words are a hard enough order that everyone goes still. The raccoon looks at him for a long moment, and then his small body starts to tremble. His knife hand drops.

“I can find your team.” Thor says, quietly. “I can bring them here from Knowhere.”

There’s a silence. The space raccoon says, finally, “The last ping the ship sent out was from Titan.”

“Then Titan.” Thor nods.

“Thor” Bruce shouts from somewhere behind Steve, still in the Hulkbuster armor. “I think--last I saw--Tony.”  He says, and fresh sting slits Steve’s stomach. “He got on a ship. I think it was headed toward Thanos’ home base.”

“Titan.” Raccoon says.

Thor’s face clears into one of determination, into one of _I’m not losing anyone else today_. “I’ll return.” Thor says, and then takes off. The silence he leaves is loud.

This is the part where the plane hits the water.

While dying, Steve thought _that_ was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. The pain was physical, and burned so cold sometimes it still hurts to swallow. But it ended in darkness.

Dying is not the most excruciating thing he’s ever done.  

“I want everyone to go in for medical.” Steve finds himself saying, despite the fact that he doesn’t want to lead this tragedy. He’s not Captain America. He hasn’t been for two years.

But this is the part where he picks up his shield and leads his forces back into battle. This is the part that the serum made him for, and who is he to deny the world what he was created to be? The only thing special about him came out of a bottle.

This is the part where Steve tries to breathe but the only thing he gets is cold water.

“Steve?” Natasha says from behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder. He can’t feel it through the Kevlar.

“We regroup.” He says evenly. Inside the tendons in his chest are tearing themselves apart, fighting to separate.

“What about--” Rhodey approaches. He’s flipped the faceplate up, and his face has drained. They’re all unstable on two feet.

“Get something to eat, drink some water.” Steve says. “Medical. Thor will be back in a little bit, and then we can--” And then we can what?

This is the part where he excuses himself from the debate, where he leaves his friends and his team, takes the stairs carefully one step at a time, and when he gets to the bottom, drops his head in his hands and his phone to the ground and lets the loss take him.

He even hears it in his voice, the tremble, the threat. “I’ll carry Vision in.”

“Steve.” Natasha squeezes, a little, and lets go. She steps away, carefully not looking at Vision.

“Hey, uh, somebody’s gonna need to help me out of the suit.” Bruce says. “I uh, don’t know how to get out.” The fragility in his words has no place in this sunny afternoon, and it would be funny, if there was any other context surrounding them.

Rhodey bends to pick up Okoye. “We’ll get Shuri.”

Steve watches them walk away.

Finally, when he’s left with just the raccoon, Steve combs hair out of his face and lets out a long breath. When his hand come away, it comes back streaked with ash and blood.

The space raccoon looks at Steve for a long moment, and Steve suddenly wants him to wave the knife, get angry. Steve _wants_ him to let it out, like a child screaming into a pillow where no one can hear.

Instead, however, the raccoon just looks away and goes back to sit on the log deeper in the forest, amongst the ashes of his friend.

* * *

 

Vision is cold where Steve touches him. He lolls heavy in Steve’s arms, vibranium and flesh almost too heavy for Steve to carry. His head is a canyon of wires, crushed beneath the fist of a Titan.

He’s a shell, just science and metal. Like one of Iron Man’s suit without all of Tony’s heart.

This is the part where Steve takes his hat off his head and reports another death, where the war starts being about more than USO tours and red skirts. This is the part where a good man dies for the many, but instead the many died along with the good man.

Steve has broken a rib and something is off with both his arms, from his wrists to the casual socket of his shoulders. The amount of strength it took to hold the gauntlet in two hands took almost everything Steve had and everything he was given. Though, now, limping along toward the city, he wonders if he could have given more. Given everything. The stones were five inches from his face, and all he could do was hold them back.

He keeps going, careful of the fact that he holds their last failure in his arms.

By the time Steve gets back inside and up to Shuri’s lab, he feels like he’s been gargling ice water. Despite the heat, Steve just feels cold.

He’s very carefully not thinking about Bucky.

He wedges the door open, trying not to jostle Vision, and then crosses the room to lay him on the table that Shuri was fixing him at earlier. Steve spares a moment to wonder, to hope, and then stashes it away. Bringing Vision back to life doesn’t bring the rest back, and clinging to that kind of hope is dangerous. It always was, wasn’t it? Especially when James Barnes was on the other end.

Steve pauses to catch his breath after the thought, his jaw throbbing like Thanos had just suckerpunched him anew. He closes his eyes and leans heavily on the table, an effort to stop the slight hitch in his breath and the tremble in his fingers. Vision is silent beside him, no easy words of encouragement left to give.

“Captain,” Shuri says from across the room, and Steve opens his eyes. As he does, he watches her falter her step from where she’s approaching. Bruce is sitting behind her, the only thing left of the suit is the headpiece.

Her face crumples, a little, and Steve takes the moment to realize there is ash in this room, too.

“I do not understand.” Shuri says, finally, something odd in her confusion, like a blistering desperation. “T’Challa?” She says, “Barnes?”

Steve moves from behind the table to approach her. She looks up at him, wide eyed and still so very young and Steve thinks, for a moment, he understands Tony Stark perfectly. Fresh hurt from a failure, fresh devastation from a mistake. Looking at it all in the eyes of a victim of their tragedy and having nothing more to say than, “I’m sorry.”

He gently holds her by her shoulders. “We failed.” His words come out soft and comforting. He’s playing every card he was ever given as Captain America. Leading this, getting in front of the bullet. There was a reason he took the star of his chest, and it wasn’t because he didn’t want it anymore. It was because he couldn’t have it. He wasn’t the same Steve who went into the ice. Steve Rogers doesn’t even know if Erskine would choose him anymore.

“You’re…” Her eyebrows knit together. “Where is my brother?”

“Shuri,” Steve says slowly. She has to know. There’s no way she missed it.

“No,” She shakes her head and tries to move out of his grip. He makes the mistake of tightening his hands, just a little, nothing that would hurt her, in the effort to make her stay, make her understand. Her eyes flash, fear, danger, and then her bracelets on her hand suddenly spring forward, cover her fists, and she punches him in the stomach.

It impacts directly on his broken set of ribs, and Steve goes to one knee, ice water back in his throat, his lungs, his stomach. She looks at him, chest heaving, “You’re lying.” She sets her jaw, and then stalks from the room.

Bruce pops the headpiece off and scrambles to his feet. “Cap?”

Through a grit full of pain, “Go after her.” He says, “I’ll just,” and then he cuts off, gestures uselessly to the grassland full of alien remains and sunlight.

* * *

   


On one of the main roads on the outskirts of town, three cars have crashed into each other. There’s dust everywhere. One of the cars went through the wall of what looks like a business place, and the structural stability of the entire building is compromised. The bricks sway in the wind, the vibranium rebar exposed beneath. The building is half full, worried workers crawling one at a time through the brick-laden doorway. Steve peers up at it, two stories of vibranium and clay bricks, the sun squinting his eyes, heat lining his shoulders, his chest feeling nothing but cold.

He steps in, dozens of peering eyes assessing him, and says, “Let’s clear some of these bricks and get more people out at a time.”

An elderly woman wearing a cheerful green frock now heavy with dust glances at him sharply. “The building will fall.”

Steve grunts, “Ma’am, it’s gonna fall either way.”

She opens her mouth, but another woman steps beside her, touching her arm gently. She moves in front of Steve and picks up a brick. Slowly, a couple of others move in to help. A few people peer over, watching from inside the building.

Steve bends to remove a larger chunk, still bricked together, weighing probably a couple hundred pounds. It takes effort to move, and his throat starts to taste like copper. It feels like he hasn’t breathed in days and his fingers hurt, like they’re too cold, like they’re going to fall off.

“Dammit,” He breathes out, and the bricks loosen. With the momentum, he stumbles backwards and into the part of the wall left standing. The vibranium rebar gives a hollow resounding tune against Steve’s spine and the lurches dangerously to one side. Reactively, on instinct, Steve gets to the other side and puts his weight into it, his strength, and it _crushes_ , like he’s Atlas holding the world.

He’s holding the entire building up.

“It’s coming down!” He shouts, pain gurgling through his ribs and his chest and his arms and his feet and his thighs. More bricks begin to break off. Commotion erupts around him, fear and pain running in rivers down people’s spines, and the brick moving becomes hectic, people fighting inside, stumbling, bruising themselves in a dead panic to get out. It feels like chaos. It feels like the end.

Steve, the building on his back, everything cold cold cold, thinks that this is the part where the comms die out. I gotta put her in the water.

What happened to sacrifice? What would New York in 1941 look like if he’d decided “we don’t trade lives”?

He spares this a second, and then it’s raining bricks, loud like thunder, like a plane crash, and people are screaming, screaming. It’s hot and chaotic the way the snap wasn’t. The snap was slow motion, disbelief. The snap was like drowning. This is like crashing.

Steve has to get out. He’s not strong enough for this, for any of this. But, he supposes, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter how strong he is. The building is falling either way.

* * *

 

He’s manages to shift the weight, to hold it hotter, and then dart from beneath it. The rebar groans as it goes down, but the last of the people have been evacuated, and what’s a little more destruction in an already decimated city?

There’s sweat in his eyes and blood on the corners of his mouth.

Gritty, dusty, scared people who have cleared from the slow fall of the building are staring at him, but Captain America has no answers. He opens his mouth. Closes it.

“What else can I do?”

There is no answer.

A woman he does not know lays a hand on his wrist. This time he can feel it. He looks up and there is wetness shimmering in her eyes and suddenly Steve can only think about Bucky.

This is the part where they go off to war and don’t come back. Where Buck falls from the train or the helicarrier, where the blood seeps beneath the surface to form a bruise so impressive it doesn’t heal for months.

Ultron had told him that Steve Rogers can’t live a life without war, which rings true. For much of his life he’s been fighting, and for much of it he’d adapted the idea of standing back up again. I can do this all day.

He’s so cold his bones feel brittle and there’s nothing to do but shrug away from the woman and her sad eyes and look for more places to stand up, try to leverage himself so that he’s stable, so that the ice melts.

In the end, the irony just stings. Bucky had looked up at him, vulnerable and small, and said a tiny “Steve?” And that was it. The end of the line.

* * *

 

Steve is...not sure how he got here. He’s sitting on the steps that lead somewhere, anywhere, and the city moves slowly around him. People looking for others, stray children stumbling as they search for a parental figure, people sweeping up dust like they’re simply spring cleaning.

He’s not sure how long he’s been sitting there when his mouth finally tastes the blood. It rushes thick on his tongue. He thinks idly he may be dying, and that sucks, because nobody wants to die a failure. At least last time he’d stood for something. He could stand up, maybe, but Steve Rogers is tired of standing up. Of trying.

Giving up has been the coward’s way, but right now, in the cold heat of an African sun, Sam dead and Bucky dead and everyone dead ( _everyone is dead again how did this happen again_ )Steve just wants to sit. Sit here and listen to the world go on. The rest of ‘em will stand up. The rest of ‘em will do it.

Steve just needs a moment.

But he's Captain America, still, maybe somewhere deep down. He doesn't get a moment.

“This totally fucking figures,” he hears, and it sounds like a dream. Not a nightmare, but a dream that still hurts all the same. He feels bitter and lonely and regrets every fucking second of the last two years. Four words and that’s all it takes to bring it all up. “Your hypocrite ass told everyone else to go into medical when you were the one that needed it most.”

Steve doesn’t look up. In fact he looks down, at his feet in the dust. He’s shivering.

He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and it smears a long line of red across his skin.

“Hey Tony,” Steve says, mumbly, tired, pain dripping from his voice. Steve looks up then, heart glacial inside him, water at the back of his throat. Tony stands a few steps down, hands on his hips, bloodied and dirty and breathing. Steve feels nothing but regret. “It’s good to see your face.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have 3 exams and a buncha projects and i know this is NOT what's going to happen because tony is dying on his space ship and steve is buff and perfect while SPOILERS REDACTED with his stupid perfect beard. but yeah. enjoy this self-indulgence.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know what this is, i don't think this is in any way going to happen, idk guys i just don't know


End file.
